


The Fanfiction Phenomenon Explicated and Analysed

by Pline



Category: No Fandom
Genre: 1995 words, Academic Paper, College Work, Essay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 12:37:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6658021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pline/pseuds/Pline
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This essay will be focused on the beneficial aspects of fanfiction for young writers and readers, and will also try to place this phenomenon in book history.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Introduction

“Fanfiction […] is a celebration”1 wrote British novelist Jasper Fforde, and this might be the simplest and yet truest definition of the genre.

Fanfiction writers and readers belong to an internet community that is divided in an infinity of sub-communities, or “fandoms”. A fandom is a group of fans, from a few hundreds to millions of them, who love something: it can be anything from a book, to a film or a tv series, bands, musicals...

It might be hard for someone who does not belong to any fandom to understand the vocabulary created by fans. By sharing their own words, fans strengthen the bonds of their community, because they can understand each other easily while people who are not fans will have more troubles to do so.

In this essay, we shall focus on television-based fanfictions because of the specific format of TV series. The question this paper will try to answer is the following: to what extent can fanfiction be a good experience to young writers and readers?

We shall study the impacts of fanfiction on people, how a community is created between fans that live on every corner of the planet, and how it is positive as a writer and a reader. Moreover, we shall see how minorities can be represented in fanfictions, and how it can be an act of protestation against the media. Last but not least, we shall try to address whether fanfiction belong in book history and if so, what is its place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Fforde, Jasper. One of Our Thursdays Is Missing. New York: Viking, 2011. Print.


	2. First Part

Fanfiction is, first and foremost, a creative outlet for all kinds of people that find each other on the internet and are able to exchange and create around something they love and know well.

What do people do when they love something? They want to find someone to talk about it, share ideas and impressions. It might be easy to meet someone who has read _Othello_ or _The Picture of Dorian Gray,_ but it can get a bit trickier to talk to someone who has read a book you love that is not very well-known.

Growing up, one of my favourite novel was _Everworld_ by K.A. Applegate, it had everything I loved: mythology, adventures, fantasy, characters I could strongly identify with... I never met anyone who has read this series. Being a reader can be a lonely experience, that is why people turned to book clubs or other means to share their love of a story and its characters. 

Nowadays, with the apparition and expansion of the World Wide Web, it is even easier to communicate with people who love the same thing as you do, and it is even easier to find a community. Fanfiction is about belonging to a community of people who share a love so strong for a story that they write about it to expend their experience of it.

One of the positive aspects of the fanfiction community is that it is a participatory culture1,  meaning that  both fanfiction writers and readers exchange and create together.  There is a direct contact possible between writers and readers that cannot be found elsewhere.

On most of fanfiction websites, such as Archive Of Our Own,  it is possible to comment each chapter, and thus  tell the author what you liked or did not like about it.  This helps the writer to make progress in their writing,  because they can identify their mistakes and learn to correct them, and it can also serve the reader because  if they  insist on an aspect of the story they liked, the writer may  decide to  expend on it more to please the reader.

Yet, it is not simply a relation of need, even though the reader and the writer need each other, but it can also be about helping each other out. Indeed, in the fanfiction community, there exists the role of a “beta-reader” who, when asked by a writer, can read a chapter before its publication online in order to check for mistakes and inconsistencies, similarly to the work of a publisher to a novelist or a playwright.

 

Moreover, fanfiction is a means of expression for young people. Indeed, they can find in fanfictions the representation they find lacking in the media. Often mocked by the abundance of “slash” fictions2, fanfiction enthusiasts actually turn to this medium as a way of finding healthy sex-same couple relationships. Although non-straight characters have been shown more and more on television in the past two decades, that representation is still insufficient and sometimes can actually have a terrible impact on the audience belonging to the LGBT+ community.

R epresentation in  television-based  fanfiction  is  diverse:  people of all  sexualities, genders,  races,  as well as people with disabilities can  be represented  on the internet.  Obviously, people turn to fanfictions because they like the universe of the  TV series, its characters and its plot.  However, fanfiction  writers  are known to play with  what  the canon3 has to off er  and change it as they please.

For example, if one of their headcanons4 is that a certain character is bisexual, then they will write them as such. The clear lack of minority representation on television is not without consequence on the audience. If the only time a particular minority is shown on screen, then the audience will link what they saw with reality.

In the United States, the portrayal of  the Hispanic minority  has  often had negative  repercussions,  because the  rare representation Hispanics  would get was  of stereotyped character s,  often  gang members  o r  prostitutes5 .  Recently,  some Latino characters  have been  positively portrayed on televi sion such as  April Ludgate (Parks and Recreation ),  o r  Laurel Castillo  (How To Get Away With Murder)  and this  is important  both for the minority itself but also for the larger audience, so as to  lessen the stereotypes surrounding  Hispanic people.

TV series attract a large audience, and as Erin Waggoner wrote in her thesis, “a room full of twenty people can sit down to watch an episode of a television series, and nobody will be watching the same thing”6. As much as a story is presented to us, there is always left to everyone's own personal interpretation. An American drama series broadcast on television will generally have episodes that last around forty minutes each, while a comedy will have episodes of around twenty minutes. In such a limited amount of times, scenarists and directors need to decide on what is the most important to show the audience.

Fanfiction  takes advantage of these  gaps in the narrative  to  tell readers  a certain interpretation  of the  characters' journey.  Unlike films or books which  have a clear  beginning, middle, and end,  TV series are more open to interpretation  because  more  material  of the canon is  slowly given,  episode by episode.  Fans adapt  to  the new  cano n,  and so do the texts they write;  o n the inter net,  fanfictions are not “ isolated objects”,  they “want both 'more of' and 'more from' the fictional worlds they endlessly revisit” .7 Rather tha n  wanting a closure to a story they like, they  want it to continue as long as possible, throughout the works of other fans,  or their own.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 2“Slash” fiction is the romance and/or sexual relations between two persons of the same gender depicted in stories.
> 
> 3Canon is the story and the characterisation that has been explicitly established in the show, film, book, etc.
> 
> 4Headcanon is the contrary of canon, it is a fan opinion about a certain aspect of the story or its characters.
> 
> 5Latino Portrayals In The Media." Latino Market and Media Advertising. University of Michigan, n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.
> 
> 6Waggoner, Erin B. Television and Fanfiction Online: Finding Identity, Meaning, and Community. Thesis. Gonzaga University, 2012. Ann Arbor: ProQuest LLC, 2012. Print.
> 
> 7 Thomas, Browen. "What Is Fanfiction and Why Are People Saying Such Nice Things About It?" StoryWorlds: A Journal Of Narrative Studies 3 (2011): 1-24. Web. 1 Apr. 2016.


	3. Second Part

Yet, everything is not perfect and it would be naïve to think that the fanfiction world is great and beautiful at all times. Like in all group of people, there can be downside, the human is not exempt of flaws and those flaws are found in any communities, the fanfiction community included.

  
Firstly, the internet provides a sense of safety as it establishes a distance between people, since they are not in front of you, some find it easier to say hurtful things. Concerning fanfictions, some people leave vile comments to hurt the writers, which they probably would not do if the writer was right in front of them.

There are also disturbing trends that are found in some fanfictions: for example, in the American drama series _Supernatural 9_, the two main characters are two brothers who hunt down creatures of evil. They are shown on screen to have a strong familial bond, yet some fans tend to imagine that there is a romantic and sexual tension between the two. On Archive Of Our Own, there are almost 18,000 stories depicting them as a couple.

Because of its absolute freedom, fanfiction can difficultly be controlled.

Moreover, on a less serious note, fanfiction is not always well-written. There are great works of fiction, of course, with good plots, good characterisation and good English (or any other languages), but more often than not, fanfictions are simple works of literature, with plots that can be full of holes, and a style that is no equal of any Jack London or Emily Brontë.

Some trop e s can also be found over and over  throughout different fandoms,  or even the same fandoms.  It  may be for different reasons, sometimes a fandom collectively  adopt  a trait about  a part of the story or a character  and this is then found in many  fanfictions.  However,  some  plot device s  are  used again and again by writers,  often being  practically  identical  to what has already been written countless times.

Last but not least,  I believe that fanfiction does belong to book history;  it was born in a digital age  and takes advantage of that.

Writers and readers know how to use the tools presented to them to create and consume a kind of art that is often mocked by people who do not belong to its community, but it is primarily made for them and by them. Fanfiction answers a demand by supplying fans what they want, and isn't that what books have always been?

Genres of literature have changed depending on what readers wanted to read at the time, and if you look into fanfiction history, it is the same.

Thanks to its digital aspect, fanfiction is able to transform rapidly  and adapt to  this new medium.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 9\. Kripke, Erik, prod. Supernatural. CW. 2005 – present. Television.


	4. Conclusion

Fanfiction allows people to take back the act of writing and reading, there are no limits in fanfiction, which can be as wonderful as it can be terrible.

On such website as Archive Of Our Own, you read only what you want to read, thanks to the search tools and the tags. Fans are free to enjoy their favourite characters and stories without the pressure of the big media that tend to erase some parts of the audience.

Some fanfictions are complex and tackle real-world issues with an understanding that is quite impressive; they may be clumsy at times, but it encourages both readers and writers to do more research and be more open about the diverse inequalities that still exist today.

Also, the idea that the fanfiction author is but a mindless teenage girl is reductive, as some of the most read fanfictions have been written by college-educated people with majors as diverse as English, creative writing or even physics.

Last but not least, older generations are sometimes accusing millennials to be lazy and not read enough, but reading fanfiction is still reading, and some of them are as long as 500,000 words or more.


	5. Bibliography

Fforde, Jasper. _One of Our Thursdays Is Missing_. New York: Viking, 2011. Print.

 

Jenkins, Henry. _Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture_. London: Routledge, 1992. Print.

 

"Latino Portrayals In The Media." _Latino Market and Media Advertising_. University of Michigan, n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.  <http://www.umich.edu/~ac213/student_projects07/latinoad/Latinomedia.html>.

 

Daniels, Greg, prod. _Parks and Recreation_. NBC. 2009 – 2014. Television.

 

Rhimes, Shonda, prod. _How To Get Away With Murder_. ABC. 2015 – present. Television.

 

Waggoner, Erin B. _Television and Fanfiction Online: Finding Identity, Meaning, and Community_. Thesis. Gonzaga University, 2012. Ann Arbor: ProQuest LLC, 2012. Print.

 

Thomas, Browen. "What Is Fanfiction and Why Are People Saying Such Nice Things About It?" _StoryWorlds: A Journal Of Narrative Studies_ 3 (2011): 1-24. Web. 1 Apr. 2016.  <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/stw/summary/v003/3.thomas.html>.

 

Kripke, Erik, prod. _Supernatural_. CW. 2005 – present. Television.

 

Schaffner, Becca. "In Defense Of Fanfiction." _The Horn Book Magazine_ (2009): n. pag. Web. 1 Apr. 2016.

 

McCain, Katharine E.  _Canon Vs. 'Fanon': Genre Devides in Contemporary Fanfiction_ . Thesis. Georgetown University, 2015. Ann Arbor: ProQuest LLC, 2015. Print. 


End file.
